This article was originally published on Feb. 19, 2022.
People have long sought out pre-prepared foods with a long shelf life; for example, Indigenous North Americans created pemmican, a mix of dried meat, tallow and berries, which settlers later found useful for long voyages and military expeditions. Quick eats looked pretty different by the 1990s, when millions of people were replacing meals with SlimFast drinks in hopes of quickly losing weight. Sales declined in the early 2000s as they were eclipsed by other diet options.
The latest iteration of convenient consumption: In 2014 and 2015, the companies Soylent and Huel introduced powdered drinks with Silicon Valley types in mind — people who want to extend their hacking beyond computers and into their diets, by consuming all of the necessary nutrients via multiple daily shakes, no grocery trips required.
Online, you can find people who claim to have survived off of powder-based drinks such as Soylent and Huel for weeks (as Soylent’s founder, Rob Rhinehart, did) or even months and years on end. While neither company recommends this tactic, some social media users see liquid meal replacements as a welcome challenge and hope their personal experiments bring compelling results, including ramped-up physical fitness.
